Sorry, everyone, for 2 wedding posts in a row- I’m working hard at all these pics so naturally they are what springs to mind when I think about photos to post! This picture is one of my favorites so far from the wedding I shot on Saturday. The bride was really hoping for some photos without her tattoos showing. She had a big arm piece and a smaller band on this arm, and it was fun to clone it out using photoshop. It gives her a bit of a farmers tan, though… any thoughts from you guys out there on how to remove that? I just did a lot of random cloning, trying to make it blend in. I also used Portraiture to get the smooth skin look- yes, I bought it outright! The people at Imagenomics were very nice and helpful and their products (Noiseware Professional and Portraiture, among others) are GREAT for digital and HDR work. I wish I was better at smoothing skin tones using gaussian blur in photoshop, but it always comes out a bit noisy. Anyways, Portraiture is amazing and I’m going to have lots of fun learning it’s limits and abilities.

I finished with my general steps- push up the contrast, vibrancy and clarity a bit and voila! I seem to always like to change those around. Sometimes I desaturate though, going the other direction with images. I really think the individual pictures tell me what direction to go in post-processing… and there is always the fun of trying it out and seeing what can happen. Enjoy!

This photo will eventually end up in my bridal portfolio on www.kelleybard.com, but it’s not there yet. Feel free to browse and hopefully find some treasures there, though!

I photographed a wedding on Saturday- my first as a professional photographer. It was a great experience! I took 1200 photos over the course of the day… whew! I also had a friend helping out, directing the group and giving ideas for photos, and taking photos from a different perspective during the ceremony so nothing got missed. I really enjoyed the whole day, although it was EXHAUSTING. I’ve been editing today and I’m down to 800 usable photos… I hope to be able to cull it down to about 250 photos given to the bride and groom by the end of the week. Then the real editing will begin…

I took the time to switch to multiple exposures whenever possible during the day, so I could process some photos as HDR images. I got a few of the bride and I’ll see how that worked out- my experience is people don’t always make good HDR subjects, their skin looks too strange. This image, though, came out pretty well. I like how colorful the bouquet came out, and how the dress with it’s multiple folds looks. The aspen leaves, shadows on the tent, came out so beautiful. I’ll try some other images and see how they work out, post some here if they come out good!

The processing of this was done with Photomatix, and then the tif was put through photoshop, using the imagenomics noiseware professional plug-in to clean up details.

Once the wedding party has viewed all of the photos and made their decisions, the best images will be posted in my wedding portfolio gallery at www.kelleybard.com. You can see other examples of my work there as well, enjoy them!